Systematic 13F Hedge Fund Alpha

Abstract

Institutions holding greater than $100 million in securities are required to disclose their holdings in US listed stocks to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) no later than 45 days after the quarter-end, in a form known as 13F. We show that the "best ideas" of hedge funds produce economically meaningful and statistically significant risk-adjusted returns that outperform the S&P500, following tests identified in Cohen, Polk, and Silli (2010). We construct alternative measures that are more suitable for hedge funds, rather than mutual funds: conviction and consensus. We find that to systematically identify hedge fund alpha in the 13F filings, one must select the right group of managers that have longer-term views on stock picks. We construct a trading strategy that combines conviction and consensus of such managers that outperforms the S&P500 by 3.80% on average and delivers a Sharpe ratio of 0.75 over the period Q1 2004 to Q2 2019.

Keywords: 13F trading strategies, hedge fund holdings, hedge fund alpha, systematic trading strategies

JEL Classification: G11, G23